Three articles by Rafael Castillo Bejarano, Visiting Assistant Professor of Modern Languages and Literatures, have been recently published in the refereed journals Bulletin of Spanish Studies: Hispanic Studies and Researches on Spain, Portugal and Latin America, Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America, and Janus: Estudios sobre el Siglo de Oro.
In his article, “Erotismo, éxtasis, tormento: la música vocal femenina en la poesía del conde de Villamediana” (“Eroticism, Ecstasy, and Torment: Female Vocal Music in the Poetry of Count of Villamediana (Between Marino and Góngora)”), Professor Castillo Bejarano explores an, until now, neglected epideictic genre, the praise to the singing ladies, another proof of musical diffusion of poetry as social practice in the 17th Century. Villamediana’s poems sublimate the moving and passionate effects of singing in the male listener, combined along with the ladies’ beauty, thus frivolously reversing the precepts of moral treatises, to extol the dame in base upon the sensuality and seduction of the (delightful) sensorial torment inflicted to the listener. After models by Góngora and Marino (major European poets at the time), their eroticism and sensuality redefine both the relationship between the arts, and the gender characterization of their practitioners. By celebrating female singing sensuality, Villamediana ciphers in the dramatized love battles the meta-artistic competition between poetry and music, and he proposes new courtly male and female patterns that transcend, throughout the studied refinement of their talents, the Renaissance model of sprezzatura.
The second article, "'Con mayúsculas letras de oro': los nobles ante la poesía en el Viaje del Parnaso" ("'With Capital Golden Letters': Noblemen and Poetry in Journey to Parnassus"), focuses in the buffo-epic poem Viaje del Parnaso, a Cervantine reflection on poetry and the literary republic of his time. Those passages in the Viaje where noble amateur poets appear, according to Professor Castillo Bejarano's reading, uncover the problematic symbiotic relationship that linked them with professional and vocational poets —as Cervantes himself. Transposing to these passages the symbolic spaces, such as the academies, where exchange rates of social and literary prestige were negotiated, Cervantes unveils the distortion generated by the noblemen’s intrusion in the literary field growing autonomy. The article examines closely the signals through which Cervantes reveals his own struggling between necessity and dignity, between obsequiousness and artistic autonomy, between venal rhapsody of praise and fair appraisal of literary creation, thus placing the works, the merit, and the talent in a central position in the building of modern subjectivity. As he did with the lineage ideology in Early Modern Spain, Cervantes shows us how to unmask and battle the "naturalized" privileges (nation, race, gender, class, ...) still operating in our days.
In the last article, "'Doña Catalina de la Cerda, que es tan hermosa como las demás son feas': cénit y ocaso de una dama de palacio singular" ("'Doña Catalina de la Cerda, who is as pretty as the others are ugly': zenith and twilight of a unique lady-in-waiting"), Professor Castillo Bejarano tries to restore the central figure of doña Catalina de la Cerda, lady-in waiting of the queen during the first quarter or the 17th Century, consistently mistaken for other noblewomen of higher social rank. Nevertheless, this lady enjoyed an unparalleled celebrity at court, due to her beauty and personality, and became a center of attraction for courtiers and ambassadors at every ceremony, and her appealing figure served as a muse for the greatest poets of her time, such as Luis de Góngora, Francisco de Quevedo, the Count of Villamediana, Luis Vélez de Guevara, or friar Hortensio de Paravicino, among others. The article offers new archival documents that help to identify the lady and recognize a set of poems by major poets of his time as addressed to doña Catalina.
